The search engine penalties are increasing more common these days and many website owners concern a lot about ‘bad links’ that point to their site online. They think that the frequent linking from the poor quality sites could have a negative impact on their company’s search engine rankings as well as their business growth.

In order to help webmasters have more control over the links to their site, Bing has introduced a new feature called ‘Disavow Links’ in bing Webmaster Tools. The tool allows webmasters to submit page, directory or domain URLs of spammy or low quality sites that link to their site. The new feature can be found under the ‘Configure My Site’ area of Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing’s Duane Forrester said, “Webmasters have been asking for a way to disavow links for years now. This tool starts that conversation. It can help Bing understand a webmaster’s intent around links pointed at their site.”Read more

Though Google remains the most dominant search engine in the U.S., a recent report from Experian Hitwise shows that the market share of Google has dropped in the last 12 months. The shares of other popular search engines like Microsoft and Yahoo have increased during the same period.

According to Hitwise’s market share statistics, Google accounted for 65.02% of all U.S. searches made in the month of May 2012 which is a decrease from 68.11% in the same period in 2011. There is a 5% decline in the percentage change of year-over-year. Read more

The search engine giant Google is testing a new navigation interface for its search page, according to reports. The interface is absolutely clutter-free but there is a slight change in the placement of certain elements on the Web page.

The new Google search user interface, as spotted by Tecno-net, had specific vertical search options including images, maps, videos, news etc displayed as a horizontal menu between the search bar and the search results listing. Currently, the search options and navigation are present in the left sidebar of the search results page.

Last week, Bing introduced some notable tweaks to its user interface. Following this, Bing announced that it has partnered with Encyclopedia Britannica to present information that is more related to a search query on its search results page.

Bing said in a Wednesday blog post, “Starting today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with Encyclopedia Britannica to include Britannica Online answers directly in the Bing results page.” Bing says that the main purpose of the partnership is to deliver “relevant information in a more organized way” to help users find useful information quickly.Read more

Google has replaced its ‘Product Search’ feature with a new business model named ‘Google Shopping‘. The new change would charge merchants and retailers for product listings and displaying product info in the usual search results. The company says that the commercialized Google Shopping program would deliver an improved shopping experience for searchers.

Sameer Samat, Google’s Vice President of Product Management wrote in a blog post, “Today we’re announcing a new initiative to improve our shopping experience over time—so that shoppers (your customers) can easily research purchases, compare different products, their features and prices, and then connect directly with merchants to make their purchase.”

Google has been in the product placements and search for almost a decade and has been offering merchants free access for product-listing so far. Now, Google is altering some of the ground rules of Product Search to provide an efficient shopping service to users via the new Google Shopping. First of all, merchants have to pay for product placements on the search results. Google will decommission a search product that formerly listed companies for free.Read more